BLOG 56: So what happened already in the Meisner/Method Seminar? (Spoon River comes to the rescue…)

Well, I can say that I approached the whole Seminar thing with a lot of trepidation! Through a credit card glitch I lost the space I had reserved two months before and had to squander the time I had put aside for final preparations on a frantic search for a new venue – one that would be both affordable and appropriate to my needs. I was lucky when Shetler Studios came to the rescue with the Bridge Theatre – my home for classes and productions back in the beginning of the century!

My biggest worry was how to fit all the work into seven hours. I kept searching for a format that would integrate both methodologies. I was sure of one thing; starting the seminar with what I am now calling ‘sensory meditation’ – a phrase coined by my student, Vince Bandille (he is kindly allowing me to use it).  After relaxation and sensory exercises, the class would  be ready for Meisner improvisations; ones that deal with ‘objectives’ and ‘activities.’ [If you’re interested in reading some background for this process, take a look at Blog entries, #11-#13, in which Total Theatre Lab’s Integrated Acting Process is introduced along with my views on combining Method, Meisner and other basic acting techniques.] My concern was whether students would be able to absorb such opposite approaches in so few hours.  

For some time, I had been preparing for the seminar by training two students in using both techniques to practice scenes; later we started researching monologues – both drawn from one play - in the same fashion.  They would prepare with knock-at-the-door-exercises followed by their characters’ monologues. [Blog entries #49-#52 are a step-by-step chronicle of how we pursued this work.] So I thought I could do something like that in the Seminar. But how would I be able to pick the right scenes for everyone, when I had only briefly met – in person or on Skype - with some of the actors who would be participating? And what if someone cancelled at the last minute – how would I pair off the remaining partner with another  appropriate scene? And then I had a Eureka moment!

I suddenly remembered working on the Spoon River Anthology in Mordecai Lawner’s class. (Morty trained as an actor and later as a teacher under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse.) This collection consists of over two hundred poems, each written from the point of view of a different person. They all take place in Spoon River, a fictional town in Illinois still recovering from the Civil War and deal with the social and political changes of the nineteenth century as it moves into the twentieth. I’d forgotten exactly which poem Morty had assigned to me, but recalled how sincerely I’d labored over the adventures of a very discontented woman, breaking the verses down into actions, figuring out my objective and desperately trying to tie it into my own life. All the characters in these poems are deceased; some were miserable when they were alive, while others wished they’d had an opportunity to further their experience of life.

For the life of me, I was unable to think of the author’s name! I searched my bookshelves for the Anthology; finally discovering it under M for Edgar Lee Masters, I grabbed the grubby paperback, blew off the dust and began feverishly reading through all the poems.  To my delight, I discovered that I was enthralled by Master’s richly endowed perceptions of this mid-Western small town.  Although it was published around the time of the First World War, the focus was more on social and political issues related to the ravages of the Civil War, and the inevitable changes; a primary one being more freedom for women. And the backlash it produced.

It occurred to me that I could use these monologues instead of scenes for the Seminar! Even though they weren’t characters in a single play, they were often obliquely or directly connected to each other. Masters’ point of view on relationships was psychologically sophisticated and deeply human. Sarah Brown speaks to her lover from the grave telling him to go to her husband and explain that she loved both of them, and that There is no marriage in heaven, there is only love. The writing is deft in its depiction of human foibles and the inescapability of suffering. Mrs. Benjamin Pantier chafes at her husband’s lack of artistic feeling and odious sexual advances, but in another poem Benjamin is defined by the love he felt for Nig, his dog, and how his wife’s rejection caused him unbearable grief. There is humor too, dry as a bone. For example, Lydia Puckett states that her lover didn’t run off to the War to avoid being arrested for stealing hogs (!) but rather because he was told of her affair with a married man. Immediately following is a poem from the hog stealer’s point of view that says nothing about the Lydia affair, only that he would have preferred being arrested and going to prison over dying on the battlefield! I stayed up all night for two nights reading the poems and picking out three possibilities for each student.

When the actors arrived for the Seminar, I handed each one a packet, which included a strongly worded suggestion to pick out neither the most difficult nor the easiest poem, but the one that attracted them the most. Everyone spoke their poem aloud, followed by a short discussion, after which the class was directed to ask three questions. What is this poem about for me?  What is my objective and, finally, who am I talking to? I cautioned them not to hurry into any decisions about the questions, although obviously ideas were beginning to form. Then I guided them through a physical relaxation and sensory meditation during which their ideas became more concrete. The final step of the morning session was a second reading of the poem. It turned out quite as I had imagined from previous experience of working in this manner; the results were subjective and mostly held inside.

While everyone was eating lunch, I divided the group into pairs. In the afternoon, we put the characters ‘into motion’ through improvisations that followed the basic ‘knock-at-the-door’ exercise: one person with an objective while the other concentrated on an ‘activity. No one in the group was new to acting although they had varying degrees of experience with different techniques. To my great relief, however, they all worked well together. The improvisations were lively; I won’t go into detail at this point, but everyone threw themselves into their work.  And when the seminar concluded with everyone reciting their poems a second time, it was clear that the partner work had helped them gain more ‘outward’ focus, while retaining their inner intensity.  It seemed that the two methods had been combined successfully into a unified approach.

Therefore, I am delighted to announce that I am organizing a Total Theatre Lab group class in Method/Meisner scheduled to begin in the spring… Details to follow. 

Blog #55: Happy New Year! Starting off 2013 with some big THANK YOU’S and a few words about my upcoming Seminar: Integrating Method and Meisner.

In writing this blog over the past few years – and especially the last few months of 2012 - I’ve been sneaking up on the thorny subject of teaching Meisner and Method simultaneously. I mean, actually in the same class. I am fortunate in having a group of students with whom I have developed a rapport – and a few new ones, who have studied before and have some professional experience - on whom to spring this ‘bright idea’ of mine.  I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I think of Meisner as ‘method-in-motion.’

            So, what’s so difficult about putting these two techniques together? Everything, actually. Each is incredibly complicated all by itself, so you can only imagine how tangled explanations can get! I’ve often tried to ‘put it all together’ before, but I, myself, have needed to develop a deeper understanding of the psychological root system that produces both techniques.  One of the reasons for my eventual clarification of the ‘Meisner/Method connection’ is the brilliance of some of my students. Yes, good students benefit their teacher as much as the other way around. I think there’s an absolute mathematical ratio in how the learning curve improves on both sides for teacher and student, when there’s an enthusiastic and positive interchange.

            And I’m extremely grateful to my friend and colleague, Jenn Lederer of Dream Management – with whom I had the incredible good fortune to hook up over the last year.  She has provided me with a number of talented and interesting actors, the sort of students who produce this mutually productive interaction. And since it’s the New Year, I’m going to continue to give credit where credit is due, I would not have met Jenn if it weren’t for Piers Mathieson, whose skills lie in marketing for the performing arts; he happened across some of Jenn’s videos – the ones where she gives excellent tips to actors on marketing themselves. It occurred to Pier’s ever-fruitful brain that she might be interested in working with an acting teacher who knew a thing or two, and he took the trouble to get us together. Thank you, Piers!

            Anyway, getting back to my thorny subject of Method/Meisner; calling Meisner ‘method-in-motion’ helps to keep in mind the integrity of each technique. In other words, the ‘method aspect’ remains embedded, intact, in the ‘observers’ pov’ while the ‘Meisner part’ fanatically attaches itself to ‘changing the other person or people.’ I know this theory sounds like gobbledygook, but if you think about it and work on it enough, it can be very useful. Making them work together is a bit like focusing the eye of a camera. The way you seem to just push buttons and the camera does all the work. However, it’s not simple at all, because we have to become the camera; which means we have to first understand and then manage a ‘mechanism’ by which we can be both one thing and its opposite.            

            There’s a play called I Am a Camera, (which, in turn, became the musical, Cabaret). It is based on Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical set of short stories, titled Goodbye to Berlin. The character, Isherwood himself, is seemingly passive in recounting the events he watched unfold. But the power of the story - one of the most evocative depictions by an Englishman of Berlin in the ‘30’s - is how he juxtaposes the determination of the characters, to lead the ‘gayest’ possible life – with double meaning of the word intact – against the hideous encroachment of Hitler’s fascism.

            One of the reasons this story has enjoyed several dramatic incarnations is that the ‘gaiety’ and the ‘horror’ are equally real. Isherwood achieves this by writing his own character from two points of view: the impartial ‘camera’(objective master or cover shot) and the involved young man (subjective close-up). All his characters were living their lives to the fullest, including Isherwood himself, but a part of Isherwood acted as the lens of a camera; aware of the oncoming doom,  not experiencing it consciously, but  enabling it to record the ‘truth’ of the entire experience.

            This is what a very good actor is capable of doing; going full bore toward an objective, but at the same time reflecting the inner obstacles that are pulling him/her back, AND fully interacting with the other characters. If all the entire cast is engaged with equal skill in this process, you get a wonderful result - like the production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, currently in previews on Broadway. Scarlett Johansson plays Maggie like an total steamroller, without losing any of the aspects of the character. The first act is a tremendous challenge; Maggie’s character has the job of setting up the show, exposition, etc. while, as a character, establishing purpose, compassion for others and vulnerability. A pretty tall order! I saw one of the first previews, and I’m sure Johansson will loosen up and balance the pacing a little more, but she’s got my vote!

            I know that none of this is particularly enlightening about how I will present the Method/ Meisner work in my seminar - but where would the surprise be if I told you all about it ahead of time? No, seriously, it’s impossible to explain, except in boring and wordy terms, how one is going to teach something until one is actually doing it.  Afterwards, we can discuss how it was done, including the responses of the students and that makes it much more interesting. So the subject of integrating Method/Meisner will definitely be covered in great detail in later blog entries. I’ve begun a discussion of this process in earlier ones, so if you’re interested you can scroll through some recent headings which announce the contents of the blogs.

            By the way, one more detail, relating to Piers Matthieson and how he came to introduce me to Jenn Lederer. Years ago, when Piers was a teenager he was studying acting with me. For a brief period he was homeless - I had completely forgotten this - but he reminded me that I offered him my living room couch for several weeks or months.  So, curmudgeonly as I may be, I must admit that there is something to ‘What goes around comes around…’ 

BLOG #54: MORE ON WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLF, HARPER REGAN, AND

I’ve seen a lot of Albee’s plays; recently I was deeply moved by his A Lady from Dubuque in which he so perfectly encapsulates the world that revolves around a ‘cancer victim,’ as well as the victim herself. But nothing prepared me for the latest presentation of Virginia Woolf presented by The Steppenwolf Theatre Co. that recently opened on Broadway.  What I’m talking about and what is so stunning about this production is the attitude of George toward Martha, and George’s reasons for his seemingly vicious attack on and betrayal of her at the end of the play. In my opinion, George not only understands Martha’s pain, nymphomania, and inability to hold her drink – as opposed to him – but his love is strong enough to include an  awareness that his wife’s imbalance comes from a source so deep and so connected to her past that she has no hope of survival unless desperate measures are taken. 

            Both the acting and the directing suggest that this is a correct interpretation of this latest revival; Martha is not depicted as a tough, harridan type, as in previous Broadway incarnations of the play, but instead as a woman who is trying to force her husband to take her in hand because she is incapable of doing it for herself. And take her in hand he does, by forcing her at the end to face the ‘fiction’ in their lives, so, possibly they can uncover what their ‘truth’ might be. They do love each other, that much is clear.

            In this interpretation, George, beautifully played by Traci Letts gains our sympathy in spite of his apparent cruelty toward his wife, because we sense the compassion beneath his mordant wit. The younger couple - a ‘driven’ husband and his wife, a ‘mouse of manipulation’ - come into focus as ‘a drawing’ of the older couple who will later become ‘the painting’ that is George and Martha.  And I feel in Letts deeply intelligent performance of George, that Albee depicts not a weak, failed ‘man of letters,’ but one who actually cares for his wife at the expense of an all-out, go-ahead thrust toward a career. In his treatment of the younger professor, one can see that, yes, George is jealous and angry, but the driving force is a set of warnings, dished out with large doses of hilarious cruelty.

            Ultimately, the villains are neither George nor Martha, but a society that cripples the will of intelligent women, who are hopelessly trapped in views of the wife/mother model. And when they can’t bear the pain of feeling that they have failed in this ‘crucial area of womanhood,’ - and Martha is already drowning herself in misery, as well as alcohol, before the play begins - they will damage themselves and everyone around them in an attempt to escape their rage and depression.  

            Take the play’s namesake, Virginia Woolf, for example; a decent husband and a successful career weren’t enough to stave off a deadly depression.  There are several theories about her suicide, but she wrote incessantly about the difficulties of women, and one can safely assume that she would have stood a better chance of survival had she not been confined in a man’s world and had she been allowed to express her love of women more openly.

            In order to play characters of this complexity, actors must be very sure of their technique and know that the meaning of what is written on the page may demand precise and informed scrutiny. Take, for example, the brilliantly constructed British import, Harper Regan, which unfortunately is closing soon. Buy a copy, it’s worth reading. The playwright wrote the prizewinning Bluebird, also produced by the adventurous Atlantic Theatre Company. I would have given Harper Regan a prize too, not only for its ingenious construction but because the female protagonist - the play bears her name - translates terror into actions of all sorts. She’s not noble, but she’s imaginative and consistently courageous.

            This is the kind of contemporary play that really turns me on. I have a very personal reason for saying this. Harper is the kind of woman I would like to be if I had been born thirty years later. My generation shifted out of the girdles and Maidenform bras of the ‘fifties’ into the bra-burning, ‘let-it-all-hang-out’ liberalism of the ‘sixties.’ But most of us had no idea how to negotiate this ‘freedom’ we preached. We got family or husband to rescue us when we couldn’t navigate the train wreck of child care vs. career and never got either one quite right. I’m not saying that thirty years later – or even today – these problems have been solved, but it became easier to take risks. Society was much less of a problem – not everywhere, of course – but there were places to go where women could break out of whatever mold held them prisoner, particularly the one in some unconscious part of their own brain.  Harper is one such woman!

            During the early part of the play, she commits herself to a series of actions, some of them bizarre and highly questionable. But the play is so intricately fashioned that only near the end, do we discover Harper’s biggest challenge. It’s like Chinese boxes, except the smallest gives us a new viewpoint that erases all our perfectly logical assumptions of Harper up to that point. We see that everything she does relates to one Big Question. She always maintains her ‘human’ if not her ‘practical’ responsibilities. Skating on the thinnest ice, she skips around looking for whatever ‘truth’ exists in her situation. Entangling herself, trying out crazy stuff, but then finding out it isn’t what she needs, she moves on. So when she ultimately returns to her family, she is not going back into the fold.

            There are no answers in this play; but Harper Regan is able to see that family is the most important ‘undiscovered country’ that life can offer. Unlike so many husbands of yore, she returns not out of guilt, but because she genuinely finds family the one challenge she must face in life – in which love plays only a part. Because the darkness is so palpable in this play, the rays of light shine true and bright.

            I don’t think New York is quite ready for plays like Harper Regan – although it did extend its run slightly. It was well-regarded by the Times, but panned by the New Yorker in an outrageously dismissive review. It’s time will come; Cock is another play that’s a little ahead of New York’s timetable. It deals with gay issues in a completely new way. Ah, those Brits!  Well, they’ve been around a lot longer than we Americans… They have a right to their little jump on us.

            Of course, Albee isn’t contemporary or British – so much for theories and generalizations.

                       

BLOG #53: Taking note of two terrific shows recently arrived on NYC Stages, and why acting is so demanding these days…

If you have been following this Blog you will know that I am right in the middle of a very absorbing task: integrating the spirits of Meisner and Method acting techniques into a consistent teaching system. Other great masters such as Grotowski, Adler and Michael Chekov will be discussed at a later date. But right now I’m focusing on the great schism, which developed between Meisner and Strasberg, both of whom drew on Stanislavsky for their inspiration.  

            Hopefully, my attempt will help students, some of whom, like me, cannot learn a discipline unless it consists of a set of principles that fit logically together. If an actor is lacking a solid method of preparation, they run the danger of being confused when faced with a really difficult role, particularly when asked to play a character they despise.  I’m not just presenting a synthesis of the two teaching methods, but showing how each spurs the other on and their opposition is the very thing that makes them necessary to each other.

            Genius went into the creation of these techniques; before Stanislavski and the various schools that grew from his groundbreaking ideas, there was no philosophical/psychological system for acting instruction. The time has come to take these building blocks of information from the past and place them in a modern perspective so they become relevant to the work that is emerging today.

            It is interesting how serendipitous life is; last week I happened to view two plays, one fifty-two years old and the other brand new that exemplify the application of the most advanced analytical thinking to direction and acting.  The ‘old’ one is the highly acclaimed Broadway revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,  and the contemporary is Harper Regan, by the much-lauded British playwright, Simon Stephens, at The Atlantic Theatre Company. I was very excited to watch the way both embody everything that is energizing about the new way of viewing relationships in the second decade of the new millenium.  

            Great art is the embodiment of change and always contains elements that are not perceived at the time it is birthed. In the early ‘60’s when Albee wrote Virginia Wolf, the great changes in attitudes toward women which were about to happen, hadn’t yet. Wendy Wasserstein’s Uncommon Women and Others, set in a progressive women’s college in the ‘70’s makes abundantly clear how even the most ‘advanced’ women’s views about themselves were still seriously unsettled even ten years after Virginia Wolf.

            In the traditional well-made plays, exemplified by great writers like O’Neill, Williams, Ibsen, and Shaw, the problems of women generally arose from men attempting to dominate them or stereotyping by society pushing them to ‘break out’: Mourning Becomes Electra depicts a woman bored in her marriage and driven into villainous behavior; in William’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Maggie is married to a man who ignores her, and when she misbehaves, casts her aside, Hedda Gabler commits an atrocity because she is maddened by a conventional marriage and then finds another man has stuck her in an even worse situation, St. Joan is done in by politics, but the hook they use to get her is an accusation of ‘witchcraft.’ 

            Moving into the latter part of the 20th Century and first decade of the 21st, the role that society plays is less evident in the conflict between men and women, but women are still depicted as pitting themselves against men in an unequal battle. If you look at the work of Mamet, Rabe, Shepard, Foote, Shanley, you see women struggling to be strong – or trying to ‘bring men out of themselves’ and be more communicative. These are stories of struggle; even if the men and women end up  staying together, which they almost never do, it’s the ferocity of the battle that counts - and the playing field is almost always uneven, favoring the man.  At the moment I’m not discussing the women writers – except for the brief reference to Wendy Wasserstein. They are very important and need a discussion all unto themselves.

            For a moment, I would like to return to Virginia Wolf - and later Harper Regan. I saw the original production of Virginia Wolf. No doubt, I said to my friends that it was, ‘Really cool, man.’  Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill boozed it up and yelled at each other in a wonderful, crazy way, and, of course I was a mere babe in the woods in those days and hadn’t much idea what was really going on. My father took me to see it; he was in Academia, and we laughed over the idea that this kind of booze-infused activity probably went on after we’d left the hosts of the faculty parties we used to attend together. (It wasn’t unheard of in those days for a daughter to accompany her father to a party!) I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing Virginia Wolf again, but I got tickets for my husband and daughter, who had never seen it. And they were very moved by the production and insisted that I go and see it. Well…. I was amazed at the difference between the version I had viewed and this one. I thought about it a lot, and finally pinpointed exactly how the interpretation had changed.

            This is getting long, and I will continue in my next blog entry…

BLOG #52: Tweaking Meisner and Method to create a workable method:

            In the last Blog entry, I talked about the importance of backing the Meisner Knock-at-the-Door exercise directly with personal sensory work rather than ‘making up a story’ and then backing that with personal material. In this way, one has only two stories, the one in the script and one’s own, and the task is to ‘feel’ them as one. Sometimes it can feel like chasing the Minotaur, but – to mix metaphors – for the true actor there are many pots of gold throughout the labyrinth.

            Working in this way – without made-up circumstances - partners are required, through sensory work, to dig deeper into themselves and find a personalization of the other actor; this process of ‘searching the self’ puts one’s own feet onto the trail of the character and brings one directly into the situation in which the relationship with the partner is embedded. As I have said before, this is a very complex idea, and I will continue to describe it from different points of view in order to make it clearer. It cannot be grasped all at once.

            To continue on from the last entry; Actress A was beginning to show signs of feeling more comfortable with the idea of the Voices and how they translated into ‘objects’ from her own life. Actor B was going through a similar process; his question was different, of course. He had to ask himself ‘what was his most difficult memory of having to break away from someone he loved.’ Or put another way, ‘when had he felt the necessity to follow his own path, however the devastating the consequences might be for someone close to him?’ The second is better because it opens a clear way to Actor B’s/Dunois’ objective.

            Both characters have very strong objectives. Although technically Joan probably has the stronger need, Dunois feels at this point that he stands to lose everything if he continues to fight for her cause, but he also knows that he is abandoning her.  So the scene – or in this case the two monologues can be approached through improvs, in which the actors switch between ‘pursuing an objective’ or ‘dedicating him/herself to an activity’.

            So far, we have principally discussed how the actor who has the objective prepares his role. Now we must show in detail the preparation of the actor who is more ‘acted upon;’ the one who is satisfied with the situation as it is. This is an odd word to use vis-à-vis Joan the Maid, who was never ‘satisfied’ a moment in her life. However, before the moment in which this scene takes place, Dunois has lead her armies to victory , so one could certainly agree that his generalship was satisfactory. Now, however, he is shifting his position and asking Joan to accept his decision to drop out of the fight against the English.

            She has no inkling of his altered stance at the beginning of the scene and continues for quite a while to be her ebullient, confident self. Even in her monologue, she doesn’t appear to have accepted his withdrawal of support – clearly she is still of the opinion that she can change his mind. (There is another monologue at the end of the scene by which time she is fully conscious of the trap into which she has fallen, and line by line she resigns herself to her fate with immense intelligence and dignity, at no point showing even an ounce of self-pity.) But at the point in the scene under discussion, her objective is to win back Dunois, so one could say we are observing one objective up against another objective.

            Since this is the case, why can’t we leave out the ‘activity’ altogether? Because the ‘activity’ is not called an ‘activity’ for nothing. It’s certainly not called a ‘passivity!’ And even when I didn’t know why I was doing it - I have always required students to rehearse scenes from both points of view: first, ‘taking the objective’ and then ‘doing the activity,’ or vice-versa.

            Meisner defines a good ‘activity’ - for use in an improv - as something difficult to execute that leads to a necessary result. Example1: you have broken a dinner plate that is part of your mother’s set. She has a dinner party coming up immediately and you have to glue it back together. Example 2: your finicky boyfriend’s birthday is coming up in a few days and you’re shopping on the Internet for a present. Your girlfriend has just broken her leg and you’re trying to write a poem to cheer her up.           I used to attend a very good Meisner class and knocked my head against these improvs over and over again. I spent hours and hours behind a door creating imaginary circumstances. And then I began teaching classes of my own, perpetuating what I had been taught. I have always felt that the premise was right, but that it required ‘something more’ and ‘something different’ while going along the same general path. I think it’s always like this with methodologies. They fit the time in which they are set up, and then as things change, they morph slowly. And, of course, there are actors who do better following one method more deeply as opposed to another. But that is not my subject here - another blog entry-in-the-making.  I will state, categorically, that most actors need both Meisner and Method – and lots of other things too, but these are absolutely basic.

            This is my thinking – I may have said this before, but not quite like this: Method is me, myself and I taking in the world and being affected by it from over here where I stand, while Meisner is me being tossed around by the world and endeavoring to hang on for dear life to a piece of me, myself or I.

            So, to get back to Actor A and Actress B and their improvs on St. Joan; they alternated struggling with their activities and bursting in through one another’s doors for several sessions. However hard they tried, the work kept falling into lifeless and unfocused patterns. The actors were becoming bored and almost despairing. This is not unusual, as human beings are not machines and our systems need to adjust slowly Finally, I did something I avoid when there is more than one actor present.  We had a discussion about the ‘sensory objects’ they were using, Actress A for her ‘activity’ and Actor B for his ‘objective.’

            In the next entry I will take a little breather from this subject to discuss a couple of plays I just saw, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf and Harper Regan - and their relevance to this discussion…

BLOG #51: Meisner helps move St. Joan along but without losing its sensory roots…

This entry follows along from numbers 49 and 50.

            The next time we met for class, Actress A (Joan the Maid) and Actor B (Dunois, the General) were prepared to engage in a Meisner Knock-at-the Door improvisation; this was to help them identify with their characters in two monologues, both of which came from the same scene, in Shaw’s St. Joan. As I mentioned in the previous Blog, I keep the set up very simple - just parent, lover, friend, etc. - so each partner can slip in their own personalization of their ‘adversary’ in the scene. Yes, the partner always becomes an ‘adversary’ in one way or another, because all drama is based on conflict. And the actors are asked to be very specific about how they personalize each other and the situation in which they find themselves - and a myriad of other details, which I will describe in a moment.

            As I have mentioned before the actors had been working for some time on these two monologues. Along with extensive sense memory work, they had  also engaged in Meisner Knock-at-the Door exercises.  We began each two-hour session with a discussion of how their preparation had worked for them and what problems they encountered during the week when they worked by themselves on their monologues.  Usually, they expressed a kind of ‘general confusion,’ which almost universally grips actors, who have the courage and stamina to grapple with their roles as if they were dealing with their own lives. I insist that they stick to their guns, no matter how much their own experience may appear to differ from the characters they are endeavoring to play. 

            Although this process requires imagination, I believe that the actual facts of our lives must be the basis for relating to the facts of the character. I do not believe in ‘pretending’ that we have had the same experience as the character or that we should try to match our experiences to those of the character.  Instead, I believe we need to identify our deepest area of trauma and how it sends each one of us on a search toward an objective, which evolves constantly from our creative work.  A true actor works from the complex premise that human roots are an entity, which can be ‘felt’ - if not totally comprehended – across eras, cultures, races, gender preferences and all other divisive factors. It’s an extraordinary trip but not for people looking for quick results or an easy ride…

            In order to encourage this process of identification, I ask questions about the text that cannot be answered simply. They can only be arrived at through a series of steps, which in turn raise more questions; all of which eventually lead to a deeper understanding of the script itself.  It arises from the actor recognizing things in the character that are particularly relevant to their own life. 

            I tend to harp on the negative, not because I’m a sadist, but because it is incredibly difficult for actors – or anyone else for that matter - to dredge up their primal pain. Yes, primal pain – not anything recent. After all, the seeds of our trouble lie in our early years; and for many of us we only managed to survive that period by burying the details of childhood in a deep fog of forgetting.  Therefore, it is really counter-intuitive to go chasing after those memories and bringing them to the surface. 

            But what makes this process for acting particularly difficult is that figuring out the ‘source of tragedy’ is only the beginning.; one needs to continuously fight off the ‘flight from pain,’ as the actor must often dwell for extended periods in that ‘shadow land’ of discomfort and fear. For instance, how does one honestly ‘get down’ with St. Joan, who spent the entirety her teenage years under the stress of obeying a set of extraordinary demands from Voices that only she could hear and then faced imprisonment and trial followed by a horrifying death. The actress playing her in our society, today, has to battle against a kind of moral imperative to turn away our conscious mind from shameful or deeply painful occurrences. The need to ‘be cool,’ as well as our survival instinct, instructs us that ‘we need to stiffen our upper lip’ and go on.  How many times I used to censor myself as a young actress for ‘wallowing in misery’ when attempting to get to the bottom of my character’s motivations. There is a myth that one doesn’t have to suffer for one’s art, and it’s so prevalent that it gives ‘Method Acting’ a bad name. Humph!

            Here is a series of questions I asked Actress A about St. Joan. How did the Voices start? What did the Voices sound like to her? Why did she feel that she had to do what they said?  How did she find a way to deal with the difficulty of putting into practice the imperative to do ‘impossible’ tasks? At first, she couldn’t even imagine how to go about it, so I kept encouraging her to ask herself this question, “When have I had an experience like this?” Pretty weird, eh?  “When have I had an experience like listening to ‘Voices’? Whenever I suggest that a student ask themselves this sort of question - which I am forever doing - I close my own eyes, breathe, ask myself the same question and go into a brief meditation…

            I’ve just done it now, since I’d forgotten what came up for me when I asked Actress A to meditate on the Voices… Asking and meditating, however briefly on my response, turns a ‘good idea’ into real experience.

            I must test myself each time to make sure that I’m in the same ball park as the student. I can teach only from a position of ‘discovering for the first time.’ It gives an edge of energy and excitement, even if the memories are upsetting – especially when they are upsetting. The process can be annoyingly slow and confusing for students, but for me nowadays, the answers pop up quickly so can encourage my students that this process actually works. After a while, these memories fit into the pattern of one’s whole life, bringing the character directly into line with oneself.

            I’ve discussed this process elsewhere and will refer to it again and again, attempting to make it clearer and more accessible; for the work at hand I’m endeavoring to explain how we segue from it into the Meisner improvisation, which will be the focus of my writing for the next blog entry…

            We will continue this analysis next time in Blog #52. Please stay tuned:

BLOG # 50: How to play Jeanne the Maid before she became St. Joan. Combining Method and Meisner helps us detect tricks of the mind…

         

Reading entry #49 will facilitate an understanding of what I am writing here. In order to understand how Method and Meisner can work together, we are using as examples monologues, spoken by two characters in a scene from Shaw’s St. Joan. On the one hand, we have a nobleman and general of the French forces, Dunois (Actor B) – also known as Batard, because he was the illegitimate son of the King’s brother – and Joan the Maid, (Actress A). In Dunois’ monologue, he tells Joan that he is no longer willing to lead his troops against the English because they have no chance of winning.

          In my previous blog, I demonstrate how ‘reasons’ can also be excuses, and list possible ulterior motives for Dunois’ behavior.  I suggested that Actor B do some relaxation work and ask himself questions in order to find, within his own life, a situation that would help him discover the character’s true objective. Historical research is very important for acting in a play like this one, from a former era, set in a foreign country, but the actors must still dig into their own lives to find the roots of their characters. 

          Now, we will take a look at the Maid of Orleans, as Joan was called, and see how she was shaped by her family and her very unusual personal character. My student, Actress A, found it daunting even to begin a search this complicated. Nothing about the character lends itself to easy analysis. Joan is a peasant girl, a young teenager – she was no more than nineteen when she was burned at the stake five years after she first heard her Voices tell her to save France. She never learned to read or write and, of course, had no training in sword fighting or military strategy. Her entire life after the age of thirteen was guided by the Voices of her saints that softly spoke in her ear.

          For two months now, I have been working with Student Actors A and B on this medieval puzzle, with its seemingly remote characters and plot lines. In spite of concentrated sensory work, the actors are still having a lot of difficulty finding personal connections to these historical figures. So we decided to set up some Meisner Knock-at-the-Door improvisations. Since they were working on monologues within a scene and not on the scene itself, I had them trade positions each time we met. One time, Actress A would perform the activity and Actor B would come in with the objective, the next time we’d switch it around with Actor B doing the activity and Actress A coming in with the objective.       

          I have changed some elements in the way I teach Meisner from the way I learned it; for example, carefully researched sensory objects play an important part both before and during the improvisations. (I’ll go into more about this later.)  Another way in which I have altered the approach is not discussing situations between the actors ahead of time. Relationships are defined only in general terms, father, daughter, friend, etc.

          Over the years, I have trained myself to observe life very systematically, in order to relate it to acting. The actual way that cause creates effect is quite different from the way we think it works. (This is a broad topic which, in time, will get its own explanation.) However, there is one thing I have noticed that is particularly relevant to this discussion - relationships dissolve into chaos when conflict arises.  Everybody knows this, but it happens to a much greater degree than we would like to think. Objectivity decreases as the severity of the conflict increases. Finally coherent thought disappears altogether, and only the point of view of each person remains and is manifested in his or her behavior. The worlds of the two antagonists cease to be shared in any way. This usually creates great danger for at least one character, who may be almost totally unaware of what is going on.      

          For example, Joan, a peasant, dreams of a France that is based, ultimately, on democratic principles. She fights to the death for this outcome in each and every scene of the play. Obviously, there are other factors that come into playing her character, but this determination is first and foremost, and the actress playing her has to relate in one way or another to it before she can get into the Joan ‘ball park’.

          Dunois is an aristocrat, flawed from birth because he is a bastard son, but none-the-less a nobleman, with all the attendant qualities of concern with prestige and property. So what does he want above all else? Well, one thing, he doesn’t care about is the integrity of the entity called ‘France.’ He’s not at all sure that fighting for it is in his best interests; not if too many of his men are killed and another big landowner, the Duke of Burgundy, in this case, prove too powerful an enemy; one who would swallow up Dunois’ lands if he got in his way. Up to this point in the play, Joan and Dunois have fought side by side, now they are sharply divided by their interests.

          This is the heart of the matter; the sort of thing actors can sink their teeth into. It’s very difficult to grasp, but it is right there. Often, I talk a lot with students in order to help them find something in their own lives that will move them into the very spot where the character lives. In my next blog entry, I’ll discuss how Actress A and Actor B go about preparing and executing an improvisation that will help them identify with their characters and identify the source of the energy that motivates their conflict…